


Your Tender Fire

by heartstone



Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Abiogenesis, Biology, Love Confessions, M/M, Romance, Years of the Lamps
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-20
Updated: 2019-08-20
Packaged: 2020-09-19 05:53:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20326174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartstone/pseuds/heartstone
Summary: “O! Mighty Arising, thou who call to me from afar in the Halls of Stone that I mistook for my rightful destiny! Doomed I am, to love thee whom God has marked as future martyr! Doomed I am, to worship that which I have e’er strove against, that supreme Chaos which has changed all Order! But wherefore would they have need of my Order, without Chaos opposed? And what life would there be without thee?”***Mairon makes a secret confession.





	Your Tender Fire

Sonnet III

by Pablo Neruda

***

Bitter love, a violet with its crown

of thorns in a thicket of spiky passions,

spear of sorrow, corolla of rage: how did you come

to conquer my soul? What _via dolorosa_ brought you?

Why did you pour your tender fire

so quickly, over my life’s cool leaves?

Who pointed the way to you? What flower,

what rock, what smoke showed you where I live?

Because the earth shook- it did-, that awful night;

then dawn filled all the goblets with its wine;

the heavenly sun declared itself;

while inside, a ferocious love wound around

and around me- till it pierced me with its thorns, its sword

slashing a seared road through my heart.

***

He reclined upon a felled tree, lain across as if gracefully in swoon and that rotting divan had but to catch the Vala on its sweet bed. Still and silent, save for dreamy murmurs, the Leviathan slept in motions more gentle than His waking Power, and Nature- ever His attendant- thanked that dormancy of His rest: ferns curled and unraveled to shade Him with their lacy leaves, their spores like little scarlet rubies, wide-eyed at the serenity of capricious _Change _as above Him they wafted the still air. Parasols of fungal caps bloomed about Him from the log He rested, their fine nets of mycelium like silver threads of larval silk as they drank deep of the ambrosial sap that dripped from the veins of that makeshift seat. The decay perfumed the air, drawing colourful beetles to His brow in a crown of opal-wings, shimmering with the subtle flickers of many legs and antennae.

From afar the scene drew a flame of lovely hues of gold like dawn, a smoldering ember through the quiet forest with naught but the smell honeyed decay to follow. And as he drew nearer to that uncommon scene of Chaos in His nap, it seemed to the Flame that time flowed in reverse- flowering plants and trees were felled, until all the wood around him declined to shorter and shorter heights, as if in bent reverence to the scene at its center. Seedless plants and giant ferns grew in abundance, the bygone kings, until even they prostrated themselves for the vivid greens of ground-crawling mosses and their swollen capsules that bobbed on thin setae.

Golden rays of the flame-Maia’s heat bent upon His graceful sprawl, and the ancient life that surrounded them hummed in delight at the vapours that the Flame’s heated gaze misted into the air, and sighed with the breath of a thousand spores their delight as he drew nearer, near enough to bend too, his knee, cushioned in a patch of moss on the ground next to the fallen log. Satyr’s beard mushroom hung from the Vala’s shoulders as a royal cope, and the beetles that crowned His temples shifted, and some flew to form a thin circlet on the kneeling Flame, distinguishing him as the most pious of His worshippers. Yet, no other modesty than the cover of fungi did this resting behemoth have, and the Maia trembled to behold Him.

With gentle hands the Maia cupped the pale hand that lay limply at His side, and kissed the joints of each knuckle with carnation lips, their petals quivering- what Power it was that could spark from those fingertips! What Power indeed coursed His veins, within the thin, feeble-seeming lines of blue that branched under His niveous flesh and pooled deep within that softly rising chest. Power as a latent well, awaiting for a flick of consciousness, or a command, to pour forth and manifest. How the earth would sigh and moan, aching like a lover to have that might loosed upon its crust! How would it feel, the Maia wondered to himself, flickering fervently, to have that consciousness turned upon himself? He kissed the last knuckle.

“O! Mighty Arising, thou who call to me from afar in the Halls of Stone that I mistook for my rightful destiny! Doomed I am, to love thee whom God has marked as future martyr! Doomed I am, to worship that which I have e’er strove against, that supreme Chaos which has changed all Order! But wherefore would they have need of my Order, without Chaos opposed? And what life would there be without thee?”

The Vala shifted slightly, and Mairon paused in his thoughts, watching intently with inferno-eyes the tranquil expressions which shifted like the golden glow of his gaze upon the planes of His face. The Maia let his fingers through the dark silk of His hair like waves of black sea, and shuddered.

“Remember,” the Flame began, “That holiest of dawns when thou descended a second time upon Arda in her violent fit? After thee tired of the spray of magma or of throwing rocks down upon her surface to break the earth into fire-framed plates? Dost thou remember how thee landed on her primordial surface, and brought with thee the cold of the endless void to freeze her tumultuous temper, creating lightening and thunder, and the first rains?”

Mairon stopped and smiled, and the tears of his reverence glistened.

“I remember, always,” Mairon said softly, “How thy Chaos created the first Order: how thou hath created great lightening storms to strike the writhing sea and make those pretty long necklaces, each bead a glistening atom. How thou hath kept thine volcanoes alive and angry, foaming beneath the waves, and how these chains of atoms grew about them in a dizzying array of seeming random patterns and tangles, which made the first bubbles of life, deep in the darkness where the light of the Valar shine not.”

“I remember, how thou delighted in the teeming, formless creatures, and how the Valar thought them pests. And I have not forgotten, how thy first children made the air as it is like now, pouring from their tiny bodies the _cibus vitae _that life would now perish without. How thee paid back thy small creations with ample radiation to adapt, and how thou art the basis of all natural progressions of life: perpetual Change. How thy cause famine and sickness to keep them strong, so that no action of the Valar could break them.”

“I have come to love them too, the tiny creatures, and have come to love the alchemy which hath made them, and that allows them to order themselves. I have come to love thy larger forms: those that feed off decay and break down the order of dead things to give them back to the earth so that they might be fashioned into new shapes. I have come to love the creatures of many legs and hard shells and I have come to love thy giant beasts of scales and bone and teeth which roamed the lands afore the cold thou brought again returned them to their atoms, so that thou might play with the creatures of warmer blood and fur.”

“I love them,” Mairon whispered, his voice cracking under the strain of his confession. He had, in his outpour of words, sat up now on the rotting divan next to the Vala’s still sleeping form, and bent over Him now so that his hot tears fell on the cool, pale flesh of the Vala and made salt-crystals. The Maia leaned down over Him, and pressed his lips to the crest of a cheekbone.

“I love them,” he said softly, “And I love thee.”

**Author's Note:**

> This went from secret love confession in the beginning and changed to a vague fantasy perspective of the origin of life D: Whoops!  
There must be a method of cycling in an ecosystem, or resources will never replenish themselves- there also must be a continual input of energy to flow through the ecosystem (like the sun). I think Melkor could be the source of these two things in the beginning of Arda, His Chaos destroying things so that they may renew, and His Power flowing through it as a Source- after all, He gave His Fëa so liberally to Arda.  
How cool would it be if Melkor was accidentally responsible for making the microorganisms through which all other life arose? Either in the "primordial soup theory" or in the deep darkness of the ocean near those hydrothermal vents which I am sure He would have created. In addition, these microorganisms would cause diseases that later on in Arda would get associated with His evil.  
Of course, the idea that Melkor made fungi is not original, but I love the concept of Him making decomposers to break down the ordered molecules of dead organisms. Harp_of_Gold was my main inspiration for that bit <3 <3  
Mairon, seeing that He is necessary to balance out the static, unchanging nature of the Ainur, cannot help but love Him, and all the creations he associates with Him.  
***


End file.
